On 3/21/14, 11:35 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote: >> From: David Kastrup >> Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 18:02:53 +0100 >> >>> In some ancient discussion Linus said that a commit that doesn't bring >>> in any diffs is "madness" and shouldn't exist. Or maybe I >>> misunderstood. >> >> You probably misunderstood. > > Quite likely. But maybe you will be kind enough to explain what Linus > meant in these two messages, when he said that an extra merge-commit > is wrong and has "zero semantic information in it"? > > https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2006q4/018265.html > https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2006q4/018273.html He's saying that in the context of tracking a remote branch. He's saying that if I'm pulling from your repo and I haven't made any changes, then it's pretty rude of me to add random empty merges which only signify when I happened to run the "pull" command. What I really want it to just collect your changes and add them to my repo, using fast-forward merges to move my branch to the latest commits. In particular, I don't believe he is saying anything about merging across release/master/feature branches. In fact, I've seen many people advocate "git merge --no-ff" when merging important branches together. -David